Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I don't think this lends enough credit to how centralized the music industry is and the role that plays. If you want the world's music catalogue, you need contracts with like three companies. That level of centralization makes it straightforward to get a music catalogue going with basically everything someone might want to listen to, but it also severely hampers your ability to do anything those three companies don't want. If anyone's wondering why Spotify is pushing podcasts so hard, it's because that's the only way for them to get out from under the thumb of the few music megacorps that they have to license from to stay relevant. Spotify needs a revenue stream less dependent on the big three and it sees podcasts as its way out.

I'm sure music files being smaller and easier to pirate helped light a fire under the ass of the music industry to modernize, but that isn't the only factor at play here and I don't even think it's one of the main ones. If I recall correctly, Spotify is the company who went to the music labels asking for a contract. In order to show that the tech works, they had to pirate the initial catalogue until they had deals with music labels to license the music. Spotify brought their streaming vision to the music industry, not the other way around.

I believe Netflix had a good catalogue at first because every other company was sleeping on the streaming boom that Netflix was ahead of the curve on. Netflix could get good streaming license deals because nobody really cared about this little company they'd never heard of. As soon as everyone realized what was up, they scrambled to copy Netflix and pulled their libraries to fracture the streaming space.

From the start, the music industry knew what Spotify was and could be and knew how to use their leverage to keep themselves on top (Spotify isn't functionally allowed to be their own license for music creators, for example). I don't think the movie streaming space realized what Netflix was until it blew up.

I don't think the problem is that movie/tv hasn't "figured it out." The music space would be just as fractured if it wasn't as centrally organized. I think the problem is that the industries are just structured really differently, so they played out really differently.

To be clear, I'm not defending the music or movie/tv industry. I just think the situations are more nuanced than "music freaked out and got their shit together and movie/tv hasn't yet."